Laura
Moriarty's Self-Destruction (Sausolito:
Post-Apollo, 2004). Laura Moriartyenters the third decade of her
careerTwo Cross Seizings in 1980 was
followed by the better known Persia in 1983with
an exciting book that carries forward the penchant for splitting, doubling,
and twinning seen in Symmetries (1996) and
presses the enigmatic handling of narrative fragments first perfected
in the brilliant and bewildering Nude Memoir
(2001) into new territory ("He is against themes or me having them").
If the specter of Marcel Duchamp presided over Moriarty's recent volumesthe
disjunctive detective work of Nude Memoir
set out from the premise that Étant Donnée depicts a crime
scene, while the fractured hermetic network of "The Large Glass"
was a crucial model for Symmetriesthe
drive to "self-destruction" is aptly overseen by the ghost of
Jack Spicer, the secular martyr to the tautological structure of language
whose innovative use of serial forms and whose signature tropesthe
radio (as figure for the poet), the moon (all-seeing eye of a gone God),
the ocean (whose noise, like poetry's, needs no audience), Mars and Martians
(site and cipher for the alien and the unknowable)serve as points
of departure for Moriarty's densely-patterned, obliquely-framed glimpses
of the self as it shades into and is sometimes eclipsed by the other.
The book 's two unevenly sized sections form an asymmetrical diptych of
sorts. The long first section, "My Disappearance," unfolds over
the course of seventy-two poems, some in chiseled stanzaic forms that
rival Robert Creeley at his intricately sounded best, others in prose
paragraphs favoring opacity, incompleteness, and indeterminacy. The topography
of this section is the familiar yet alienating one of hotel rooms (associated
with privacy, anonymity, and eroticism), convention halls (teeming, commercialized,
disorienting), and the transportation hubs that serve to move the "Mental
Traveler between / Arrivals" ("Sycorax Inside"). Returning
repeatedly to the ways in which war and empire form the untranscendable
horizon of subjective experience, these poems are remorseless and poignant
at once: "I don't miss my friends / Who have become unknown to me
/ The truth can't be communicated / The war keeps us in touch" ("Missing").
The second section, only a third as long as the first, counts among its
eleven poems a thirteen-page meditation on "Cryptophasia"
the scientific term refers to the language twins often concoct to communicate
with one anotherthat synthesizes many of the book's most persistent
themes and weaves in numerous citations from other writers (John Wilkinson,
Brent Cunningham, Giorgio Agamben, Taylor Brady, Karl Polanyi, John Taine,
Gail Scott). Starkly non-identical, these twin sections add up to one
of the best books to be published so far this year. [2004-35]

Pascalle
Monnier'sBayart,
trans. Cole Swensen (New York: Black Square, 2002). A meditation in four
seasons on the life/myth of the 16th-century French knight named in the
title, Monnier's sifting of archival traces calls to mind a quieted-down
Cantos, one from which
the bombast and nostalgia have been subtracted, but also some of
the verve. Swensen's able translation delivers intact the rhythmically
overlapping syntagms of Monnier's subtle phrasal poetics. [2002-24]

George
Elliott Clarke'sBlue(Vancouver:
Polestar, 2002). These poems aim to be "incendiary," but such
heat as they give off seems curiously second-hand as invectives "in
the manner of" writers like Baraka and Pound come off as, well, mannered.
Many of the poems in this overlong collection allude to alchohol, slide
at least once into Quebecois French, exhibit some color symbolismoften
with racial overtonesand draw on a semantic register that favors
the profane, the taboo, and the excremental. Clarke's prosody is loosely
Ginsbergian, though strings of compound adjectives here and there build
to a logic-defying momentum worthy of Césaire. The whole project
has the air of something that could or should work better than it does,
but at the risk of confirming the scholar-poet Clark's distrust of critics
(see "Blue Elegies" iii.i-iv), I'd have to say that the misfires
outnumber the hits in this collection. [2002-23]

Beth
Anderson'sHazard(Los
Angeles: Poetic Research Bureau, 2002). The twenty poems (four sequences
of five each) in this handsomely-designed chapbook follow an identical
stanzaic pattern, one ample and intricate enough to admit of significant
variations while also permitting the reader to experience a kind of peripheral
or intermittent consciousness of structure (that pattern, counted out
in lines-per-stanza, is: 1-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-1). Anderson is a master of the
syntactic measure, blending novelistic and essayistic tones with first-person
statements that retain a cool observational air without ever feeling aloof.
There is an evenness to the distribution of "event" in these
texts that defies thematization, but word-by-word the construction is
so sharply focused that it comes as a surprise when one finally has to
admit at poem's end that what has happened remains a mystery. "To
confirm that this, as every universe, // moves according to an intrinsic
unplanned order / has taken hours." [2002-23]

Philip
Jenks's On the Cave You Live In(Chicago:
Flood, 2002). Jenks reads like a transitional figure between the now defunct
apex of the m and the current (if furtive)
Faucheuse. His first book tucks thoughts of
God and memories of the South into the apprehensive intervals between
epileptic seizures. The loose interconnectedness of the poems recalls
Fauchueseeditor
Jeff Clark'sThe
Little Door Slides Back(which
itself reads a little like a condensed gothic novel) and the care for
sonic patterningrich assonance and consonance in short lines that
often omit all function wordsrecalls fellow Flood author Pam Rehm's
recentGone
to Earth.
The mood in this slim but substantial debut is dark, the speaker damaged,
the exits from the cave anything but clearly marked. "Plumes of garbage
/ mixed w/dead body photos / she got darkroom, carnival. / I made me get
naked for it / show my ink // seen, not shown" ("Angela").
[2002-23]

Harryette
Mullen'sSleeping
with the Dictionary(Berkeley:
U of California P, 2002). There are fifty-seven poems in this OuLiPo-inspired
collection by the author ofTrimmingsandS*PeRM**K*T,
and some of them"Denigration," "Junk Mail,"
"She Swam on from Sea to Shine," "Swift Tommy," "We
are not Responsible," and the title poemshake something fascinating
out of their procedures. Almost all the others shimmer for at least a
moment, but as happens so often in the "literature of constraint"
there are stretches where the riffs feel rote and a reader feels awkwardly
beside the text's point. [2002-23]

Kim
Rosenfield'sRare
Earth: A Play in Some Acts(Primary
Writing 27: April 2002). Cosmetics ad-copy comes to life in this quick
and mildly funny micro-play first performed in 1995 at St. Mark's Church.
"Sexy sexism. / Good bye lizard lips! / The drought is over / Your
lips stay looking rich. And moist. / And very very human." Makes
an interesting companion piece to the second section of Bruce Andrews's
Lip Service, which draws heavily on the lore/lure
of femininity as a figment of patriarchal capitalism. [2002-23]

Karen
Weiser'sEight
Positive Trees(Boston:
Pressed Wafer, 2002). A chapbook comprising two poems, the strangely syntaxed
"Out the Body There Are Planned Things" (dedicated to Fanny
Howe) and the multi-part elegy "Eight Positive Trees." There
is an unfocused, if not evasive, feel to the opening poem that the second
poem fixesless in the sense of correcting than of repairingwhen
the speaker situates herself as one of four sisters who have lost both
of their parents to a sudden accident. Finding an objective correlative
for the complex emotional state in which she's been stranded becomes an
act equally of artistic construction and psychological reconstruction.
[2002-23]